Old mines still plague Montana's Clark Forkhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/contaminants-montanas-clark-fork-river-superfund-river-cleanup-mercury-pollution-mines
Why one of the nation's largest Superfund river sites can't address pollution from abandoned mines.Cold, rapid and icy blue, the Clark Fork is Montana’s largest river. It begins its journey as Blacktail Creek, tumbling down from the Continental Divide at Pipestone Pass, near Butte, and threads its way between the Flint Creek, Sapphire and Garnet ranges on its way to Missoula. A century ago, one of North America’s largest copper booms rattled the river’s headwaters in Butte. Several hundred mines burrowed beneath the city, and in 1908, a flood washed tons of contaminated sediments from those mines into the river. Arsenic, copper, zinc, lead and cadmium contaminated millions of tons of sediment along 120 miles of the river’s banks — all the way to Missoula. The river’s legendary but struggling trout all but vanished.

Then, in the 1980s, researchers discovered arsenic in the groundwater of Milltown, a city built along the river about 100 miles west of Butte. This discovery sparked decades of litigation and, ultimately, the nation’s largest watershed restoration project — the $1 billion-plus Upper Clark Fork River Superfund Complex, which is still in progress today.

That’s what drew chemist Heiko Langner to the University of Montana in Missoula in 2002. The German native had moved to Bozeman several years earlier, as much for its backcountry skiing as for graduate school at Montana State University. He remained to study the Clark Fork: His field was environmental chemistry, and he was intrigued by the effects of contaminants, such as those from Butte’s mines, on natural environments.

In 2006, Langner, who was also a recreational birder, teamed up with biologists to examine how those contaminants might affect birds that prey on fish. They studied ospreys along the banks of the Clark Fork, taking blood samples from chicks to determine whether contaminated fish were hurting them. In 2007, Langner’s blood samples showed that the cleanup effort appeared to be working, at least in regard to arsenic, copper, zinc, lead and cadmium. “Those contaminants everyone was talking about — it turns out that none of those seemed to be affecting the ospreys directly,” he said last year. “What we were finding instead was real high concentrations of mercury,” a neurotoxin that can accumulate in the tissues of fish and other aquatic organisms. At sufficient concentrations, it harms the predators — the ospreys, otters and even human beings — that eat them.

Heiko Langner, a chemist formerly at the University of Montana, found high concentrations of mercury in ospreys on the banks of the Clark Fork River.

Kindra McQuillan

Langner wasn’t surprised by the presence of mercury, which was often used historically in metal mining. Rather, he was surprised by the “odd geographic distribution,” he said. The highest mercury levels were found in chicks nesting farther downstream from Butte’s copper mines, and vice-versa. “We actually double-checked if we had switched some samples or if we made some other mistake.” But the following year, the researchers confirmed that the neurotoxin wasn’t coming from Butte. Over the next five years, Langner’s team traced most of the mercury to a single source — the remains of the Rumsey Mill, an abandoned silver ore-processing facility on a small tributary called Fred Burr Creek.

Kindra McQuillan

Meanwhile, hundreds of state and federal employees, students, advocates, volunteers and contractors have spent over a decade planning, litigating and working on the upper Clark Fork’s Superfund cleanup. They’ve excavated a third of the soil from the riverbanks and shipped it to repositories upstream near Opportunity, a town of 500. They’ve torn down a dam, re-routed the river, restored wetlands and planted riparian vegetation. There has been a lot of successful restoration, but it has a long way to go.

Extending that work to curb the mercury contamination would be a fairly easy fix, if Langner’s research is correct and it’s mostly all coming from one source. It would cost a fraction of what’s already being spent on the massive cleanup on the very same river system. But here’s the catch: The Superfund project, which is projected to take another several years, legally can’t do anything to address the contaminants from Rumsey or from the hundreds of other abandoned mines upstream. And both federal and state agencies lack the necessary funding to deal with them.

So Langner and others are asking themselves: How can so much energy be put into a cleanup when some of the most dangerous contaminants are being ignored? The answer, as with so many natural resource issues in the West, lies in how the money flows.

Ruby Shaft Mill, an abandoned mine and mill near Granite, Montana.

Mark Hedlund

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program has a relatively small pot of money (primarily from a now-discontinued tax on industry) to reclaim hazardous sites, such as old mines. That’s not enough to pay for much reclamation work, so it’s used for litigation, to force responsible parties to pay for the damage they did. In the Upper Clark Fork Superfund Complex, the Superfund law allowed the EPA and the state of Montana to sue the Atlantic Richfield Company, or ARCO, a multinational mining conglomerate. ARCO bought Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which owned many of Butte’s hundreds of mines (including the famous Berkeley Pit), in the ’70s, and operated for several years before closing them; now, the company is paying to clean them up. Legally, that money can only be used to remediate damages from the ARCO-owned mines in the Clark Fork area. But ARCO never owned Rumsey, or any of the other hundreds of abandoned mines in this watershed. At this point, no one owns them. And without anyone to sue, the EPA is close to helpless.

What’s more, the Superfund work could even exacerbate the problem. “There is a different and complicated (chemistry) with mercury,” Langner said. “(Cleanup) measures that can be great for copper or zinc can be counterproductive with regard to mercury.” As part of the Clark Fork’s restoration work, crews have sculpted a new channel and restored wetlands alongside it. Wetlands by nature are full of bacteria and low in oxygen, and when mercury encounters these conditions, it can easily become methylmercury, a much more toxic form of the chemical.

The mercury from abandoned mills and mines is also a problem for anglers. “It’s not compatible with blue-ribbon trout fishing,” Langner said. The area’s legendary trout fishing draws tourists, and money, from around the world, but it depends on clean waters.

Rumsey’s situation is far from unique.Miners flocked to the state by the thousands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in search of gold, silver, coal, gems and other minerals — and later abandoned many of these mines and mills. And more recently, companies have abandoned numerous mines after going bankrupt. Rumsey is just one of hundreds of thousands in the American West.

To locate the Clark Fork, enter "Butte, Montana" in the search box. You can also use the search box to locate mines near any town you choose. Click on the dots to read more about each individual mine site, including what that land is currently being used for and what remediation efforts have been taken. This map includes noncoal abandoned mines in Montana, as identified by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality's Abandoned Mine Lands project. In the legend, "U.S. Government" includes a large number Forest Service owned properties but may also include a federal entity not yet listed. Where a field reads "blank," that indicates no data was present for that record. Some records were too incomplete to map. For more on the AML project or to access the complete database, visit their website. Map by Kate Schimel.

Beal Mountain Mine, an abandoned open-pit gold mine, sits on Forest Service land near German Gulch, a stream that feeds into the Clark Fork. “German Gulch has a rare, 100 percent pure strain of westslope cutthroat trout, which is a really important native species in Montana,” said Missoula-based Bonnie Gestring, who works as an advocate for Earthworks, a national nonprofit that helps communities fight the mining industry and deal with its impacts. Gestring grew up in Great Falls in north-central Montana, a region plagued with acid mine drainage from old coal mines. She began studying effects of mining pollution on the Clark Fork’s aquatic animals as a graduate student in the mid-’90s. “Part of the grand Superfund plan is, as the river recovers, that (German Gulch) would be a source of westslope cutthroat to repopulate it,” she said. It’s a fine idea, but the German Gulch trout might not be able to repopulate the whole watershed if the Beal Mountain Mine keeps releasing selenium, a chemical that’s deadly to them. And unfortunately, as is the case with Rumsey, the Superfund money legally cannot go toward cleaning up Beal.

Nationwide, it’s estimated that there are over half a million historic and modern abandoned mines. In 2000, the EPA reported that mining has contaminated the headwaters of more than 40 percent of Western watersheds. Reclaiming the mines that aren’t currently being addressed would take $35 billion or more.

The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management received about $7 million and $17 million respectively to reclaim abandoned mines on their lands last year. “That isn't remotely sufficient to address the scale of the problem,” Gestring said. The Forest Service estimates that Beal Mountain alone will take about $39 million — pretty much dwarfing the agency’s annual budget for abandoned mines. And, of course, that federal money doesn't touch the hundreds of thousands of sites on private and state lands — including Rumsey, which sits on private property.

The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) can be used to try to clean up abandoned coal mines on private and state lands (as well as federal land)— but only in states where there is active coal mining. Under SMCRA, the federal government charges companies a tax on operating coal mines (between about 15 and 30 cents per ton of mined coal, depending on how it was mined). A percentage of those royalties goes back to the states where the mining occurs, to reclaim abandoned coal mines (and in rare cases, other mines, too). Montana is one of relatively few states that have active coal mining, and one of still fewer allowed to use SMCRA royalties on non-coal mine reclamation. The state gets between $3 and 4 million in SMCRA royalties per year to deal with thousands of sites — not nearly enough to help its lands recover from over a century of mining. “There's certainly more environmental problems associated with abandoned mine lands than there will ever be funding to take care of,” said Tom Henderson, manager of the Abandoned Mines Section of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, the state agency that puts the SMCRA royalties to use.

Gestring says the solution is simple: “If there was a federal royalty for the metal-mining industry, there could be a consistent source of revenue to fund” abandoned non-coal mine reclamation. Unlike oil, gas and coal, the metal (or hard-rock) mining industry does not have to pay royalties to the federal government. This is due to the 1872 Mining Law, which has not been updated since it was first passed in an attempt to encourage the settlement of the West.

Sediment removal in the remediation efforts for the Clark Fork Superfund Site near Milltown Dam in 2008.

M Kustudia/Wikimedia

In the last few decades, there have been a handful of congressional efforts to update the law. The most recent is H.R. 963: the Hard Rock Mining Reform and Reclamation Act of 2015, a bill introduced by Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., in February. This would levy an 8 percent royalty on new hard-rock mines and a 4 percent royalty on existing ones, charge reclamation fees, and use both of these sources to reclaim abandoned hard rock-mines — much as the SMCRA program does with coal mines. The bill is still in committee.

However complicated the legal and political mechanisms that keep abandoned mines abandoned and leaching, communities themselves have equally complex forces at work. During his research, Langner recruited volunteers to help gather sediment samples from stream banks abutting private land. In 2013, one of his volunteers trespassed on private property to conduct the research, and Langner's response to the situation ruffled feathers in the community.

Locals have known about Rumsey Mill’s mercury problem for decades, though many are hesitant to speak publicly about it. But the Granite Headwaters Watershed Group has been gathering research on the mercury issue for several years. (Several members declined to be interviewed on the record for this story.)Headwaters has emphasized a local approach, holding monthly meetings and producing a newsletter to encourage community interest. The group is working independently from Langner, who now lives abroad.

Downstream, the main stem of the upper Clark Fork is beginning to look like the wild, beautiful river it once was. Cottonwoods along the river’s newly restored floodplains are leafing out, and trout have made a comeback. As Gestring said, the ideal cleanup would be comprehensive, but overall, the Clark Fork project is looking like a success story. “There are a lot of people working on it, and a lot of thought going into it,” she said. “It’s one of those iconic rivers. It’s beloved.”

Rolling whitecaps thumped against the aluminum hull of the CRITFC3 as Bobby Begay piloted the boat up the Columbia River on a breezy spring morning. Herons and cormorants skated against the blue sky. On the vessel’s dashboard sat yellow binoculars, a bag of snickerdoodle cookies, and a carton of orange waterproof explosives, each the length of an index finger. These were the seal bombs.

Begay, a boulder-sized fisheries technician at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), swung the boat hard to port. The glinting black head of a sea lion bobbed near the river’s Washington bank. Russell Jackson, a technician whose ponytail poked out from under a Seahawks cap, leapt to the bow. In one smooth motion, he hoisted a Remington .780 Marine Magnum 12-gauge shotgun and fired a couple cacophonous rounds. Another crewman flipped a seal bomb over the starboard gunwale; seconds later, the detonation resounded against the hull. The head vanished.

Though the sea lion surely disliked the rude treatment, it wasn’t harmed. Jackson’s shotgun was loaded not with bullets but with cracker shells— explosive projectiles designed to scare away critters. Seal bombs, despite the militaristic name, are also designed merely to annoy. For years, CRITFC, the fish and wildlife agency that represents four Columbia River tribes, has been hazing sea lions away from Bonneville Dam, the first hydroelectric dam on the journey upriver. The reason: to prevent the pinnipeds from devouring the sturgeon, lamprey and especially endangered salmon surging upriver to spawn.

Seal bombs, like this, and other hazing techniques may temporarily push sea lions downriver, but they don't seem to have long-term benefits.

Ben Goldfarb

This spring, that task was harder than ever before. Driven by environmental changes a thousand miles away, unprecedented numbers of sea lions flooded into the Columbia. The influx reignited a smoldering debate: What happens when a federally protected marine mammal clashes with an endangered fish? To their detractors, sea lions are ravenous pests; to their advocates, they’re scapegoats for the myriad other problems afflicting salmon. But almost everyone agrees that they’re symptoms of a degraded river, in which natural conditions have been replaced by human meddling.

The seal bombs discharged, Begay idled the boat and stared downriver, waiting to see if the sea lion had fled. “We’re seeing a lot of new animals this year,” Begay said. “It’s like everyone brought a friend.”

For proof that conservation works, look no further than Zalophus californianus, the California sea lion. (Don’t let the “California” fool you: The species ranges from Mexico to Alaska.) Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, sea lions were slaughtered for their hides, oil-rich blubber and even their genitals, which Chinese pharmacists turned into a tincture intended “to rejuvenate the aged.” By 1927, fewer than 1,000 remained.

The population hung on for a few decades after plummeting fur prices put hunters out of business, but it didn’t truly explode until 1972, when Congress prohibited killing, injuring or harassing the creatures via the Marine Mammal Protection Act. These days, more than 300,000 California sea lions roam U.S. waters. “This population is probably at a higher abundance level now than at any time in the last 10 to 12,000 years,” says Bob DeLong, a marine mammal biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.As sea lions rebounded, they began colonizing the lower Columbia River, where, as far as archaeologists can tell, they were relative strangers. In 2001, six sea lions turned up in the tailwaters of the Bonneville Dam, 145 river miles inland, where endangered salmon and steelhead congregate before ascending fish ladders. Two years later, 31 sea lions feasted there; the year after that, around 100 showed up. Steller sea lions, their bigger, tawnier cousins, also started traveling upriver.

It’s hard to say exactly how many salmon the sea lions consume. Biologists have suggested the animals eat about one in 25 returning spring chinook salmon at the base of the dam. But predation throughout the entire river may be far higher. In 2010, NOAA fisheries biologist Michelle Wargo-Rub began inserting trackable microchips into chinook at the Columbia’s mouth to see how many actually made it over Bonneville Dam. In 2011 and ’12, more than 80 percent of the fish reached the dam; but in 2014, only 55 percent got that far. Nearly half the run, in other words, disappeared somewhere in the lower Columbia.

The evidence implicating Z. californianus is circumstantial, but it’s compelling: Fish that Wargo-Rub tagged in March, when sea lions are abundant, most often vanished. After sea lions decamped in May for their California mating grounds, salmon survival shot up.

To be sure, sea lions are far from the greatest threat to salmon: Dams, fishermen, habitat loss and invasive fish species like bass and walleye all take a huge toll. Nonetheless, the pinnipeds are undoubtedly a problem. “The estimate (of only 55 percent survival) might not be spot-on, but we’re focusing on the trend,” says Wargo-Rub. “And the trend is that we’re seeing lower survival these past few years at the same time that we’re seeing more predators.”

This spring, the sea lion influx grew even larger — and you can blame The Blob. Last fall, NOAA’s DeLong realized that pups in California’s Channel Islands, where sea lions have rookeries, were growing only half as fast as usual. Females had a hard time finding enough food to nurse their offspring; thousands of pups either starved or headed to sea before they were strong enough to survive. Scientists fingered two culprits: the collapse of the sardine fishery; and the mysterious appearance of a vast patch of North Pacific warm water, nicknamed The Blob, which drove off other prey. Emaciated pups washed ashore on California’s beaches, flooding rehabilitation centers. As of May 20, over 3,000 young sea lions had stranded — 15 times more than in a normal year.

Though mothers and pups had a brutal winter, male sea lions, which have no offspring to nurse, were able to wander, flipper-loose and fancy-free, far from rookeries. Though some males swim up to Oregon every year, the lack of prey in California drove record numbers to make the trip — and a smelt boom in the Columbia River kept them fat and happy through February. Then they stuck around for the arrival of spring chinook salmon. “These guys know where the prey patches are, and they just travel from food source to food source all winter long,” DeLong explains.

This spring, biologists counted 2,400 male sea lions along the waterfront in Astoria, Oregon, near the river’s mouth — 1,000 more than last year’s record. When I visited Astoria, blubbery creatures were draped, slug-like, over the docks, basking in the cold sun. A few bore pink serial numbers seared into their fur, so biologists could track their movements.

Today, all but a handful have returned to California to breed. But in a few short months, they’ll be back again — and we humans will face some tough decisions about how to handle them.

It’s a rancorous debate. Salmon recovery in the Columbia River is big business — the federal government spends over $500 million annually on behalf of the fish — and some fisheries managers are incensed that the fruits of their labor are being gobbled up. Fishermen, meanwhile, complain that sea lions steal their catch. "We figure, on a whole, that about 75 percent of our fish are being taken out of our nets when we're trying to make a living," commercial fisherman Mark Burns toldThe Oregonian in June.

Back in 2008, Oregon and Washington received permission from NOAA to trap and euthanize sea lions that continued eating fish at the dam. These days, the states are authorized to “remove” up to 92 repeat offenders annually. Since 2008, the states have euthanized 85 California sea lions (including 30 in 2015) and sent another 15 off to captivity. Seven more California sea lions, and one Steller sea lion, died accidentally in traps. (Stellers, which are endangered, aren’t targeted for killing.)

According to Robin Brown, marine mammal program leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the program has proved its worth. “Every year after we started removal in 2008, the average number of California sea lions feeding at the dam went down,” he says. “We were making headway” — until this year.

Headway or no, the killing infuriates advocacy groups like the Sea Lion Defense Brigade, which watchdogs the government’s pinniped activities on Facebook. To the mammal’s defenders, lethal removal is a distraction — and an ineffective one at that — from everything else that harms endangered fish.

“It’s not that we don’t care about salmon — it’s because we care about salmon that we don’t want this program to continue,” says Sharon Young, marine issues field director for the Humane Society of the United States. “It’s an old solution: Something’s in my way, so I have to kill it. It’s like the squirrel and the birdfeeder: You may kill the squirrel that’s on the birdfeeder today, but you’re crazy if you think some other squirrel’s not going to replace it. You’re just setting up a treadmill of death.”

But Brown says the states’ permits, which require that individual sea lions appear at the dam at least five times before they can be taken out, make it too hard to remove sea lions. “Once these animals travel 145 miles from the ocean, they’re really only there to do one thing, and that’s to eat fish,” he says. “If the whole goal is to reduce the number of threatened or endangered fish they take, they should be removed immediately.”

To their detractors, sea lions are ravenous pests; to their advocates, they’re scapegoats. But almost everyone agrees that they’re symptoms of a degraded river, in which natural conditions have been replaced by human meddling.

The Columbia River tribes, whose fishing rights give them a vested interest in salmon recovery, have pursued a middle ground: hazing the animals without killing them. In 2008, CRITFC received federal funding through the Columbia Basin Fish Accords to begin harassing sea lions near the dam. Since then, Begay and his crew have spent each spring firing cracker shells and dropping seal bombs.

After my ride with Begay, I joined Doug Hatch, the fisheries biologist who heads CRITFC’s sea lion program, at an overlook above the Bonneville Dam. Two dozen dog-like heads nodded in the white churn of the dam’s tailrace, their sleek bodies porpoising as they hunted. Every minute, a sea lion surfaced with a salmon clenched in its jaws,shaking its head violently to break the fish into more manageable chunks —nature, red in tooth, claw, scale and fin.

I asked Hatch, a 25-year CRITFC veteran, how well hazing works. He laughed. “Short answer: It doesn’t,” he said. “We’re moving them downstream, but once we quit hazing they’re coming right back. It’s one of those things where we’re doing it out of frustration because there’s not much else we can do. It’s not the long-term solution.”

Ultimately, the tribes want more authority to kill problem sea lions. In January, congressmen from Washington and Oregon introduced a bill that would grant CRITFC the power to remove the creatures themselves. “The tribes have put tremendous effort into salmon recovery, and we hate to see all those fish lost before they’re able to contribute to the next generation,” Hatch said above the roar of the dam. “We certainly don’t advocate killing all the sea lions, but we need more management options.”

In the quest for a solution, we can safely eliminate at least one idea. Soon after I visited Begay and Hatch, Astoria officialsdeployed a motorized artificial orca, dubbed “Fauxby Dick” by the Twitterati, to scare the sea lions off the docks. The fake whale went belly-up. The sea lions didn’t move.

The conflict, like many animal issues, seems mired in ontologically divergent views about what wildlife actually is. To many biologists, it’s a resource, akin to timber or fish; and the goal is sustainable management on a grand scale. “We believe in renewable natural resources,” Hatch told me. “The population of California sea lions is at a very high level, and that population can certainly sustain removal without any biological effects.”

To groups like the Sea Lion Defense Brigade, however, sea lions are the epitome of charismatic fauna, capable of breathtaking underwater elegance and possessed of giant liquid eyes that — anthropomorphism alert — project intelligence. Sometimes they cuddle. Sometimes they dance. To sea lion lovers, treating Rupert, Rocky and Simon like fungible objects is akin to blasphemy.

Columbia River debates tend to return, like spawning salmon, to the dams, and this crisis is no different. By concentrating and disorienting salmon, Bonneville Dam has created prime conditions for a canned hunt. The sea lions are simply behaving like human fishermen at a stocked trout pond. Of course, any species that becomes so bold as to actually flourish in our novel ecosystems will face our wrath: Ravens that nest on power towers get poisoned and shot; coyotes that prey on livestock are terminated with extreme prejudice. Indeed, on the Columbia, a handful of sea lions have already been assassinated by anonymous killers. The mammals are victims of their own success.

This spring’s sea lion explosion serves as a reminder, too, that the West’s coastal ecosystems from Baja to British Columbia are connected — and that our understanding of those connections remains murky. Scientists still aren’t sure why The Blob bloomed and the sardines crashed. Perhaps climate change and overfishing played a role — but many marine processes remain opaque to us, and both ocean temperatures and forage fish populations are notoriously cyclical. While it’s tempting to ascribe every environmental change to human agency, the ocean has its own inscrutable logic.

Back on the boat with Bobby Begay, we came across one final sea lion as it mauled a salmon; it flung the ragged fish back and forth, an oily sheen spreading across the river’s surface. A piebald juvenile bald eagle wheeled low over the water, looking for scraps. Russell Jackson reached for his shotgun, but Begay told him to hold his fire. A couple years back, he said, some Sea World trainers had advised Begay not to haze sea lions while they ate.

“Let ’em eat this fish, and maybe they won’t be hungry for the next one,” Begay explained. He spun the boat upriver and the sea lion ducked beneath the rolling blue Columbia, its belly full, for now.

]]>No publisherWildlifeOceanCoastFishU.S. Fish & WildlifeTribes2015/07/06 02:10:00 GMT-6ArticleGrand Canyon floods are rebuilding sandbarshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/annual-floods-in-the-grand-canyon-are-rebuilding-sandbars
But there are limits to what can be done to tweak dam management to benefit ecosystems. Rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is a singular experience -- or so I hear from "friends" who have gone down without me. But two backpacking trips through the canyon have given me glimpses of the glory rafters experience at river's edge: I, too, have slept on the beaches. Set against the Colorado's emerald waters, those expanses of soft, blonde sand are enough to convince a weary hiker that, somewhere between top and bottom, they were teleported to another world, anywhere but the desert Southwest.

Of course, the river's green color is a reminder that a new world has been created here. It happened in 1963, with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam, which impounds the Colorado above the canyon. Behind the dam, the river became Lake Powell, and the sediment it carried settled out in the slack water. Today, some 95 percent of the fine sediment that once churned through the canyon in a river the color of creamy coffee is trapped behind the dam. For the beaches, this means that though the river still robs them of sand, as it always has, it no longer gives much back, as it did when sediment-rich springs floods were common events. For decades, the beaches have been slowly eroding away.

In 2012, then Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a major change in dam operations to build the sandbars up again: Any year conditions were right, strategically timed surges of water would be released from Lake Powell to create artificial floods, which would mobilize sediment spit into the canyon by tributaries downstream of the dam. This month, in an article in EoS, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, scientists reported that three years in, the new strategy is working as intended. Many sandbars are growing again. "So far, so good," says Jack Schmidt, a watershed scientist at Utah State University, and the former head of the U.S. Geological Survey Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. "The cumulative results of the first three releases suggest that sandbar declines may be reversed if controlled floods can be implemented frequently enough," lead author Paul Grams, a colleague of Schmidt's, wrote in EoS.

The ability to increase the frequency of floods was the big coup of the 2012 policy shift. The first experimental flood ran in 1996, and two more were unleashed in 2004 and 2008. "Each one was its own political battle behind the scenes," says Schmidt, taking years of careful planning and negotiation. The floods, after all, have costs: They're run in the fall, and require the hydropower plant in the dam to run at full capacity at a time when demand for power is not especially high. And since only a certain amount of water is released from Lake Powell each year, in accordance with agreements between states in the Colorado River Basin, that means there's a bit less available when demand peaks. Additionally, some water bypasses the turbines during floods; its value for power production is lost altogether. "The enormous policy decision that was made by this administration was to ... not put political or administrative hurdles in front of having a flood. A flood could occur anytime nature allowed it."

The 2013 floodwaters coming out of Glen Canyon Dam.

Jonathan Thompson

And for the last three years, nature has delivered just the right conditions. Productive monsoon rains washed ample amounts of sediment into the Paria River, the first tributary downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, and the main contributor of sediment to the Grand in the post-dam world. Scientists monitor the accumulation of sand in the mainstem Colorado during monsoon season, and if it passes a certain threshold, controlled floods can be used to churn it up and deliver it to sandbars.

"It's a bit of triage," says Schmidt. "You're trying to play the best hand you can with not very good cards in your deck," since so much of the sand is still trapped behind the dam. The researchers also note in EoS that the continued success of floods as a management tool is dependent on good monsoons in the future. But how seasonal storm patterns in the Southwest might be affected by climate change is still highly uncertain.

Like the sandbars, humpback chub -- an endangered fish, and the last chub species native to the canyon that persists there today -- have also had a few good growth years. That appears to have less to do with floods than drought, however. The Colorado River is much colder than it was before the dam, because water is discharged from deep in the reservoir. That change in temperature seems to be the primary variable limiting chub growth, which is important because if young fish don't grow, they'll likely be eaten by other fish. Growth is the key to survival.

"The magic number for chub is 12 degrees Celsius," says Ted Kennedy, a biologist with the Grand Canyon Research and Monitoring Center. If the water temperature is below 12 degrees, they won't grow; if it's higher, they will. When Lake Powell is full, the dam's intakes pull water from the coldest layer of water, which is consistently between 8 and 11 degrees. But when it's low, as it is now, that chilly layer drops, and the intakes instead pull from a warmer layer, where sun-baked surface water and frigid deepwater mix. "Last year, release temps were 14, 15 degrees," says Kennedy.

While that's good news for fish, for now, it also underscores the limits of tweaking dam management to benefit the ecosystems the structure has transformed. "The number one thing we can probably do for these chubs," says Kennedy, "is something that's out of our control right now."

Cally Carswell is an HCN contributing editor, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow her on Twitter @callycarswell

]]>No publisherWaterFishNational Park Service2015/06/22 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA bull trout reintroduction in Oregon proves what’s possiblehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.10/a-bull-trout-reintroduction-in-oregon-proves-whats-possible
The ambitious effort brings a threatened predator back to the Clackamas watershed.On a damp October morning, a troop of wader-clad scientists plunged into Pinhead Creek, an icy Oregon stream around 60 miles southeast of Portland, to search for fish nests. Finding those nests, called redds, was no easy task: The same labyrinth of moss-bound logs that makes Pinhead prime fish habitat also makes it a hellacious obstacle course for humans. The crew spent that morning straddling downed cedars, crawling through alder, and getting slapped by the glossy palms of rhododendrons. “Both my feet are soaked,” declared one surveyor, whose boots had sprung leaks. He sounded more cheerful than the situation seemed to warrant.

The struggle, though, only made the discovery of the day’s first redd more rewarding. Chris Allen, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, traced its outline in the streambed with a wading pole, like a conductor guiding an orchestra. “Here’s the pit,” Allen said — where the fish had scooped out a soccer ball-sized depression to deposit its eggs — “and here’s the mound,” where it had heaped the displaced gravel.

I nodded uncertainly. Without narration, the redd would have been invisible. “It’s not an obvious one,” Allen said. “But this is about the right size for a bull trout.”

For the band of researchers canvassing Pinhead Creek, a slim tributary of the Clackamas River, every redd was an auspicious sign. Since 2011, Allen and his colleagues have relocated 1,758 bull trout into the Clackamas watershed, an ambitious — and, in some quarters, controversial — attempt to re-establish this threatened predator to part of its former range. The redd surveys have become an autumn rite, a vital measure of whether the finicky fish are spawning — and whether this landmark program can inspire bull trout reintroduction in other Western rivers.-

A lot, then, was riding on this four-foot-wide patch of pale gravel tucked against a fast riffle. Allen shrugged. “They don’t lay them in textbook places like salmon,” he said. “Bull trout are weird that way.”

Bull trout migrating to spawn in a tributary of the Metolius River.

David Herasimtschuk/Freshwaters Illustrated

Like many salmonids, Salvelinus confluentus had a rough 20th century. Once abundant from the mountains of Montana to the rivers of the Pacific Coast, bull trout were classified as threatened in 1998. The Clackamas, an 80-mile tributary of the Willamette, was a microcosm of the fish’s plight: The river’s bull trout were hammered by decades of overfishing, dam-building, and sediment runoff from logging and road-building. In the 1990s, biologists realized the fish hadn’t been seen in the river since 1963. Surveys confirmed that bull trout were gone.

That could have been the story’s end: Just another local extinction, on a planet where such tragedies are depressingly common. By the mid-2000s, however, the West had entered an era of rewilding. Wolves were again prowling Yellowstone, black-footed ferrets were scarfing down prairie dogs in Wyoming, California condors were swooping over Big Sur. The Clack’s wounds had healed: Fish passage through its dams was improved, and overfishing had been curtailed. In 2007, biologists at the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife decided the Clackamas was ready for bull trout again.

Others, however, were less enthusiastic about this apex predator’s comeback.When Allen and his colleagues proposed reintroduction, the National Marine Fisheries Service worried that bull trout would devour enough young salmon and steelhead to damage the Clackamas’ endangered stocks. Anglers — who in some watersheds once received bounties for every bull trout they killed — also balked.“At first I was dead against it,” said Bob Toman, a local fishing guide. “It’s still kind of scary to me.”

To alleviate concerns, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to label the reintroduced fish as a “non-essential experimental” population, a designation that allowed for more flexible management and shielded anglers who accidentally harmed bull trout from prosecution. The agency also designed a series of controls, many borrowed from wolf management, that allowed for the removal of individual bull trout, or even the termination of the project, if salmon and steelhead suffered. At last, with the Fisheries Service’s cautious blessing, the reintroduction could begin.

On June 30, 2011, before a cheering crowd, Allen wrestled a gleaming adult bull trout from a blue cooler and into the Clackamas River. The moment was a personal triumph for the scientists involved, one that more than justified years of preparing permits and impact statements. Said Allen, sounding a smidge emotional: “It was the kind of professional highlight that happens only rarely in your career.”

Researcher Kristen Harris with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife collects juvenile bull trout in the Metolius River to translocate to the Clackamas River.

David Herasimtschuk/Freshwaters Illustrated

The hard work, however, was just beginning: The agencies had vowed to establish a spawning population of 300 to 500 bull trout by 2030. That presented a challenge for Patrick Barry, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife biologist (now with the Forest Service) who was tasked with capturing juvenile, sub-adult and adult fish via nets and traps from the Metolius River, home of Oregon’s healthiest remaining population. For all their voraciousness, bull trout are delicate: They require frigid water, and the Metolius is three hours from the Clack. Picture technicians in a truckbed on a 90 degree day, frantically adding blocks of ice to a warming transport tank, praying their fish don’t go belly-up. “Boy, we made a lot of ice,” Barry said.

Barry and his crew gradually got better at keeping bull trout alive, and the fish flourished upon release. Radio-tracking suggests that most of the 68 relocated adults and 204 sub-adults have survived and stayed put in their new environs. Even better, bull trout haven’t generally lurked near the dams, where juvenile salmon would be easy prey. Indeed, salmon and steelhead runs have ticked upward since reintroduction began. Though that’s probably a credit to improved dam passage, it also buoys scientists’ hope that bull trout may tilt the Clackamas’ scales in favor of chinook, coho and steelhead. After all, bull troutdon’t exclusively eat young salmon: They also feast on mid-level predators, like cutthroat trout and sculpin.

“Without a big boy on the playground, those other fish have been left unchecked,” said Barry. “The Clackamas was already a relatively healthy system, but now it’s a complete system.”

If bull trout indeed stabilize the Clackamas’ food web, it could motivate similar projects elsewhere — and not a moment too soon. Bull trout reintroductions have thus far been few and far between: Besides the Clack, the only significant effort occurred in Oregon’s Middle Fork Willamette River, where biologists have managed to establish a small population of 20 to 30 spawning adults — encouraging progress, but not yet gangbusters success. Meanwhile, S. confluentus’ proclivity for cold water makes it a poster species for the perils of climate change. As temperatures rise, warns Marci Koski, biologist at Fish and Wildlife’s Columbia River Fisheries Program, pockets of warm water may create thermal barriers throughout river basins, leaving some fish stranded. “We need to protect habitat that links populations at risk of being isolated,” Koski told me. “Otherwise, reintroductions and translocations may become more commonly used tools.”

Though the agencies will stop adding bull trout to the Clackamas after 2016, October’s redd survey suggests that the new population stands good long-term odds. By afternoon’s end, we’d counted 10 certain nests; another team saw five more upriver. (Altogether, Allen and his crew found 35 redds in 2014, almost triple the previous year’s tally.) Improbably, the survey’s least-trained member — me — spotted the only actual bull trout: a dark torpedo that hugged the bank as it cruised downriver.

“I have absolutely no doubt that reproduction is happening,” Allen said, satisfied, as he stepped out of his dripping waders. “There are juvenile bull trout swimming around down there. It’s just a matter of catching them.”

]]>No publisherFishWildlifeRivers & LakesOregonEndangered SpeciesScientific ResearchNorthwestClimate ChangePhotosNot on homepage2015/06/08 03:00:00 GMT-6ArticleSenate considers legislation to help the West store and conserve waterhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/california-farmers-fear-irrigation-water-will-go-to-salmon-instead
Twelve Western states have declared drought emergencies.Cannon Michael, a 6th generation farmer in California’s Central Valley, this week told U.S. senators about the “disturbing time” he and his family are experiencing because of his state’s multi-year drought.

Because of water shortages, they'd already decided not to plant a quarter of their 10,000 acres. Then, just a few days before he testified in a Senate hearing, Michael learned that much of the tomatoes, melons and corn he did plant are in jeopardy too. The deal between state and federal officials about how to divvy up the scarce water supplies from the Central Valley Project was revoked because water temperatures are higher than anticipated. Officials are legally obligated to ensure cooler temperatures during runs later in the year of endangered Chinook salmon.

At issue is whether Michael and other farmers will get the water they expected through the summer or if the water will be held in a deep reservoir so it can be released later and lower water temperatures when the fish need it.

Michael fears the decision expected any day now could mean that for the first time in six generations his farm would have so little water that his family would have to let thousands of tons of vegetables and fruit die on the vines and take a major financial loss. And he’s just one of many big growers at risk in a region that produces a major amount of the nation’s fruit and vegetables.

Michael’s testimony was part of a hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Tuesday on droughts that are becoming more severe and frequent as a result of climate change.

Although California’s multi-year drought is most severe, 11 other Western states also have declared drought emergencies.

In Washington state, the agriculture industry expects a $1.2 billion in crop losses this year because of the drought there. It is a “challenging time for fish and farms in Washington,” said Tom Loranger, water resources program manager for Washington State Department of Ecology. The situation this year is better in Arizona, thanks to water storage projects in recent years.

“Arizona is not in a water crisis and is well situated to deal with the drought,” said Thomas Buschatzke, director of the water planning commission of the Arizona Department of Natural Resources.

Buschatze and Loranger both told senators that their states’ biggest worries concern the next couple of years. For example, Arizona worries that historic low levels in Lake Mead will trigger a need for the state to reduce how much it withdraws from the Colorado River. Washington State worries about the depletion of its reservoirs if the drought continues.

Many Western states are scrambling to figure out how to use water more efficiently and build more storage capacity for water. The federal Bureau of Reclamation has a role to play in many of their projects.

“We need to be as creative as possible and figure out how we’re going to address that role because it is critical and this isthe new normal,” Deputy Interior Secretary Michael Connor said.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who chairs the committee, said the testimony would help senators craft new legislation aimed at helping communities and agriculture respond to the challenge of droughts now and in the future across the West.

“We need to be trying to be as long-term in our view and our vision on this as possible because if this is the new normal going forward, then we’ve got a lot of work to be doing,” Murkowski said.

As for whether Michael’s tomatoes, corn and melons will get the water they need this summer, state and federal water and fish managers are meeting this week to figure that out.

State and local officials are legally obligated to make sure water temperatures are cool enough for the endangered Chinook salmon. Calculations they made this spring were off. Lots of factors have driven up water temperatures. The four-year-drought has left water levels low in Lake Shasta, the biggest reservoir, and in rivers. Shallower water is warmer. There’s virtually no snow pack in the Sierra Nevada, so no snowmelt will be coming to cool down those waters. Air temperatures have been warm too.

“That has thrown our whole plan into question,” said Erin Curtis, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. “How’s it going to impact farmers? We really don’t yet know.”

Officials hope to come out with a new plan about how to divvy up scarce water supplies by week’s end.

In the meantime, Michael is worrying about whether he will have to lay off his 55 workers. “It’s pretty disconcerting,” Michael told HCN in an interview after the hearing. “I don’t get a good night's sleep very often any more.”

]]>No publisherDC DispatchWaterDroughtCaliforniaU.S. Fish & WildlifeAgricultureFishPolitics2015/06/03 12:55:00 GMT-6ArticleFisher-poets of the pale tidehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.8/oregons-poets-of-the-pale-tide
A gathering of maritime minstrels on the Oregon coast. Pat Dixon wrote his first fishing poem in 1989, in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. For 12 years, Dixon had gillnetted salmon in Cook Inlet, the finger of water that points from the Gulf of Alaska to Anchorage. After the Valdez dumped its noxious cargo into nearby Prince William Sound, fishing in Cook Inlet was shut down, and Dixon was cast adrift. One bleak afternoon by the water, as he watched a squall move along the beach, he found himself day-dreaming about all the things he was going to miss. A poem came to him, unbidden, and there, in the front seat of his parked truck, he began to write.

Twenty-six years later, on a chill night near the mouth of the Columbia River, Dixon — a barrel-chested man with a beard the color and texture of polar bear fur — climbed onto a stage in Astoria, Oregon, to read a new poem, “Exit Strategy,” to a rapt audience of 200. In a clear, unhurried voice, he intoned:

I shall leave today,

motor through a school of leaping fish

stretching from the river mouth

to the horizon’s soft curve,

sluice my bow through a green

ocean swell, tide on my stern,

sun white alongside, burning

reflection in a moving mirror.

Dixon was among the 87 commercial fishermen who’d come to perform at the 18th annual Fisher-Poets Gathering, a weekend-long celebration of maritime verse. Readers came from Cordova, Alaska; Camden, Maine; Jyväskylä, Finland. On the streets, pickup trucks sported bumper stickers condemning salmon farms and the overreach of the National Marine Fisheries Service. Baseball caps and facial hair were de rigueur.

“This is our party, and we’re doing it our way,” Jon Broderick, Fisher-Poets’ founder, told me. Broderick is a former high school teacher who chases salmon in Alaska’s Bristol Bay with his sons every summer. He’s also a talented songwriter, and he’d followed Dixon’s reading with a swaying, klezmer-inflected ode to an alluring female cannery worker. “There’s nothing ersatz or kitsch or phony about it.”

“Write what you know,” they say, and it’s a maxim the fisher-poets have taken to heart. Their verse serves as a crash course in the daily rituals and hard-won knowledge of their profession. John Palmes, a hand-troller from Juneau, tore through a song about humpback salmon’s singular preference for pink lures (as opposed to coho, which favor chartreuse). Doug Rhodes, from Craig, Alaska, drew reliable laughs by poking fun at the government’s regulatory ineptitude. Rob Seitz, a trawler from Los Osos, California, performed “Tribute to the Five-Gallon Bucket,” a bit of doggerel about the hazards of at-sea defecation:

The water from the bucket would get your backside drenched

Kind of like those toilets designed by the French.

Even love and lust, poetry’s most timeless concerns, were contemplated through a briny lens. From Erin Fristad, of Port Townsend, Washington: “She engulfs me like she has the mouth of a lingcod / I know that shouldn’t be sexy, but it is.” The landlubbers in the audience giggled uncertainly.

On the festival’s final evening, a standing-room-only crowd packed into a waterfront restaurant that jutted out over the Columbia on wooden pilings. Rust-colored tankers glowed in the fiery sunset; sea lions honked beneath the pier. At the front of the room, a mop-haired veterinarian named Meezie Hermansen stood at the mic. Hermansen has fished summers in Cook Inlet since she was a child — “I knew I was a fisherman before I knew I was a woman”—and she’d started writing poetry in college to amuse her friends. Fisher-Poets had long been on her bucket list, and her set at the 2011 gathering was the first time she’d ever read in public.

“Now I think about the event all year long,” she told me. She’s inseparable from her notebook. “I’ve written poems out on the skiff, which is not the most convenient place to have something come to you.”

Onstage, Hermansen had time for one more poem. “Back home in Alaska, there are some proposed projects that stand to threaten our wild salmon stocks and habitat,” she said. She ticked off the dangers: coal mines that would bury streams, dams that would obstruct rivers, the Pebble copper mine in Bristol Bay. Her voice low and lyrical, she launched into the piece without notes:

We need to realize

Open our steel eyes

Before we jeopardize

What we should all esteem.

There is a place for enterprise

But we need to analyze and scrutinize

As they attempt to minimize and -capitalize

For we all live downstream.

The crowd applauded at poem’s end, and Hermansen smiled shyly as she left the stage.

To read and listen to more Fisher-Poetry by Dixon, Broderick, Hermansen and other performers, check out In the Tote.

]]>No publisherWaterFishCommunitiesPeople & PlacesOregonAlaskaNorthwest2015/05/11 04:10:00 GMT-6ArticleFor rural Oregonians, protections from herbicides come up shorthttp://www.hcn.org/articles/attempts-to-protect-rural-oregonians-from-logging-herbicides-come-up-short
Aerial spray regs remain the West Coast’s weakest after the death of a key law.In October of 2013, a helicopter sprayed a cocktail of herbicides over four clearcuts in a valley north of Gold Beach, Oregon, a coastal community at the mouth of the Rogue River. Logging companies rely on the practice to keep weeds and shrubs from outcompeting tree seedlings. The chemicals, though – including 2,4-D, an ingredient in Agent Orange – spread beyond their intended targets. As Rebecca Clarren reported in a cover story for High Country News last November, 35 nearby residents fell ill on the same day, reporting diarrhea, rashes, nosebleeds, bleeding lungs, and sickened animals.

Complaints about pesticide drift are nothing new in Oregon communities abutting private timber lands, where the spraying occurs; the state's rules governing the practice are the weakest on the West Coast. But the high profile Gold Beach incident added urgency to rural residents' and environmentalists' calls for reform.

State Senate Bill 613, introduced this February by Portland Democratic Senator Michael Dembrow and Lake Oswego Democratic Representative Ann Lininger, looked like their best hope. It would have required advance public notification of spraying, so that rural residents would know when to move livestock and pets, shut windows, and stay out of recently treated areas. Currently, the industry has a 12-month window to spray after notifying the Oregon Department of Forestry; it does not have to provide a specific date. The bill also would have forced companies to disclose the chemicals involved, and required the state to set buffers around homes and schools. As it stands, the state calls for 60-foot buffers around salmon streams and along stretches upstream of a drinking water intake, but nothing for wells or residences.

But SB613 died under industry pressure April 10 without ever receiving a hearing, even though it was weaker than rules in neighboring Washington. Going into 2015 with a freshly strengthened Democratic majority in the Legislature, “everyone was predicting the greenest legislation in 20 years,” says Steve Pedery, conservation director at Oregon Wild. But when it comes to timber in Oregon – as with ranching in Rocky Mountain states, or oil drilling in North Dakota – alliances don’t forge neatly along political party lines.

The first sign of trouble came when Eugene Democrat Chris Edwards, who has received far more in campaign contributions from the timber industry, according to theOregonian, replaced Dembrow as chairman of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee. There, the bill went into a work group instead of a hearing – and never came out.

Meanwhile, Clatskanie Democrat Rep. Brad Witt, who has received hefty contributions from timber and chemical interests, convened a competing work group in the House to come up with alternative proposals, but refused to consider advance notification on the grounds that it could tip off ecoterrorists who might attack sprayers. “It was impossible for me to make a call on whose safety (neighboring property owners or people making the aerial sprays) is more important,” he told The Register-Guard.

The surviving bills call for what the timber and pesticide industries have argued for all along: increased penalties and strengthened oversight, rather than changing the rules. They would create a toll-free hotline to report incidents, funnel more money from pesticide registration fees to the state’s Pesticide Analytical and Response Center, which investigates incidents, and instate new licensing requirements for helicopter pilots. “Part of the reason for the frustration for rural residents is that the state’s response was poor,” Salem Democratic Rep. Brian Clem, told the paper. The measures, many of which he introduced, would mean “better and faster investigations."

Pedery's not so sure. “It’s hard to say whether it’s better than the status quo. But none of those things do anything to address why complaints are actually happening.”

And at least one, House Bill 3429, might make it worse by “effectively requiring” Pesticide Analytical and Response Center board members “to either currently be employed by the pesticide and logging industries, or have been employed by those industries in the past,” thus compromising its independence, Pedery argued in April 15 testimony. “Oregon is supposed to be this great green Nirvana of the Northwest," he says, but “the politics around timber are still stuck in the ’70s.”

]]>No publisherPollutionOregonForestsWaterFishNorthwestTimberU.S. Forest ServiceCommunities2015/04/29 04:15:00 GMT-6ArticleA plague on the Klamath Riverhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.7/a-plague-on-the-klamath-river
The race to prevent a repeat of the West’s worst salmon-kill.On Monday, Sept. 15, 2014, Mike Belchik, a senior biologist for the Yurok Tribe, was overseeing an emergency laboratory on a remote gravel bar in the Klamath River on the tribe’s Northern California reservation. Generators and folding tables stood on shore. Fish blood drifted in the weak current. That morning, crews had netted two dozen salmon from a 20-mile stretch of the lower river. Now they were inspecting their catch for a parasite dubbed “the Ebola of Klamath salmon.”

[SIDEBAR]

Working quickly, the men snipped a layer of glistening gill tissue from each fish and slid it under a microscope. The parasite — a protozoan named Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, or simply Ich — is salt-colored and less than a millimeter wide, with a fringe of madly fluttering hairs. Belchik and his crew had monitored for it all summer, but only that weekend had infected fish begun appearing in their nets.

In 2002, Ich killed some 70,000 king salmon in the Klamath — the largest such die-off ever recorded on the West Coast. Afterward, the parasite population declined below detection, but it is native to the river, and there was reason to fear its resurgence.

Mike Belchik, a senior biologist for the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, scans the lower Klamath River from a boat piloted by fisheries employee Bob Ray in February 2015.

Terray Sylvester

Last September, California was already three years into perhaps its worst drought in more than a millennium, and the Klamath was low and warm. The fall salmon run had begun to arrive, but the fish were confined to pools, stressed and waiting for rain to swell the current and let them migrate upstream. In slow water thick with fish, Ich can reproduce rapidly. Thousands might feast on a single salmon. Once engorged with blood, they drop off and anchor to the river bottom. Then each one bursts open, releasing up to 1,000 offspring. The cycle can take as little as a week. “It felt like a catastrophe was looming,” Belchik says.

The Yurok crews were trying to determine whether water should be released from reservoirs upstream in an attempt to disrupt the parasite’s life cycle. Ich are relatively poor swimmers and can survive only a few days without a meal. Increased flows, the thinking goes, might disperse the parasites while letting salmon migrate out of infested holding pools, but such a tactic had never been attempted on an outbreak already underway. No one knew whether it would work in a fishery stressed nearly to failure by drought and diversions.

After the 2002 die-off, tribes, agencies, dam owners and other parties agreed to release water from reservoirs on the Trinity River, the Klamath’s largest tributary, if at least 30 parasites were found in a single layer of gills in at least 5 percent of captured fish. By 1 p.m., Yurok crews had found Ich in nearly half of their catch.

Belchik dug out his cellphone and called the reservoirs’ managers. Send water-, he said — and fast.

The upper Klamath River is impounded by seven dams, which serve some 170,000 acres of arid southern Oregon farmland. But downstream, the river flows unimpeded for 190 miles before spilling into the Pacific Ocean. This stretch and its tributaries support the third-richest salmon runs in the Lower 48. In an average year, 120,000 kings and a few hundred threatened coho muscle through these waters to spawn.

Relations between farmers and the basin’s salmon-dependent tribes are notoriously tense, and in 2001, they snapped. That spring, during a severe drought, federal wildlife managers shut off agricultural diversions to protect coho and struggling sucker fish. Farmers, who had already sown potatoes, hay, wheat and other crops, were furious. They protested by forcing open a head gate and refilling an irrigation ditch with buckets.

The conflict caught the attention of the Bush administration, and the next summer — also dry — irrigators received their full water allotments. The Yurok and others protested that the fish needed more water, but “nobody was looking for Ich,” Belchik recalls. The parasite was known for ravaging farmed fish, but such kills were almost unheard of in the wild.

By mid-September 2002, flows in the lower Klamath had dwindled to about 60 percent of average. The Yurok were celebrating an important ceremony just above the river when children began carrying dead salmon up to the dance grounds. Fish were dying by the thousands, infested- with Ich.

“It went from nothing, to major catastrophe, in a span of a few days,” Belchik says. An overwhelming stench of rot hung over the river.

Due to the die-off, the commercial Pacific salmon season in Northern California and southern Oregon was sharply curtailed in 2004 and 2005, and declared a disaster by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2006. No one felt the kill like the Yurok. Their reservation, home to roughly 1,000 tribal members, flanks 44 miles of the lower river. The Yurok ply that territory for salmon, steelhead, sturgeon and Pacific lamprey to feed their families. In the tribe’s commercial salmon season, a fisherman might earn $3,000 in just a few days — no small haul on a reservation where 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line. “We’re a fishing people,” says Chairman Thomas O’Rourke. “It was sickening.”

Steelhead gills red and swollen due to Ich (tiny white specks) and infected with another disease called columnaris, or “gill rot.”

Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program

A fisheries worker for the Karuk Tribe, exposes the gills of a healthy king salmon caught in the Klamath River.

Terray Sylvester

In 2014, the Bureau of Reclamation reacted quickly when it learned another disaster was brewing. The morning after Belchik called, the agency began releasing enough water to double flows in the lower Klamath for a week. Belchik wondered how the parasite would respond. Since the 2002 kill, his crews had inspected salmon weekly during the fall runs. Now they stepped up their effort.

Their findings dismayed them. Crews had initially looked for 30 parasites in each fish — the threshold for the emergency response — and then stopped counting, even if more were present. But Belchik soon realized they were overlooking valuable data. He told workers to count to 100, then to 200. Eventually, finding nearly 1,000 parasites in some gills, he said, “Just count them all.”

To an extent, tribes and biologists had seen the problem coming. Since the middle of summer, they had pushed the Bureau to release extra water. Such releases, purely precautionary, were a critical component of the post-2002 response measures, but had become increasingly controversial. In 2003, 2004 and 2012, the Bureau granted them, without any sign of an Ich outbreak. In 2013, however, the releases triggered a legal challenge from Central Valley irrigators. Last summer, with water supplies exceptionally limited, the agency unexpectedly announced it wouldn’t release any water until infected fish were found.

The Bureau’s hesitation sparked a backlash. In early August, members of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, on the Trinity, approached Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at a wildfire meeting in nearby Redding. A week later, tribal members and others protested outside the agency’s Sacramento office. The Bureau eventually agreed to release preventative flows, but it was late August by the time water started flowing. Ich would appear soon after, necessitating the unprecedented emergency releases of mid-September.

Some argue the Bureau’s delay meant more water was used in the end. All told, some 80,000 acre-feet poured downstream last summer to protect salmon — more than twice as much as in previous seasons. The Hoopa criticized the agency for its “reactive” approach. An outbreak, says biologist Joshua Strange, an expert on Ich in the Klamath, “has an inertia that is hard to stop.”

Karuk fisheries workers haul a net full of king salmon out of the Klamath River. The Karuk Tribe stepped in to monitor the Ich outbreak as salmon migrated upriver off the Yurok Reservation.

Terray Sylvester

By mid-October, the salmon had migrated off the Yurok Reservation, but infection levels remained severe. The Hoopa and the Karuk, farther upstream, inspected what fish they could but lacked the Yurok’s capacity. Belchik was still anxious to keep tabs on the outbreak, but he was forced to postpone his monitoring until almost November, when he received permission to inspect salmon arriving in a hatchery at Iron Gate Dam, the upper limit of the Klamath run.

What he saw surprised him: not much Ich.

A few days later, he inspected fish entering a separate hatchery on the head of the Trinity. Again, very few parasites.

“OK, I get it,” he realized. “It’s not happening.”

The outbreak had apparently dissipated somewhere between the Yurok Reservation and the dams. An unusual number of salmon in the Trinity had failed to spawn, perhaps as a result of Ich-induced stress, but no large-scale die-off occurred. “Now,” said Belchik, “begins the long process of figuring out what exactly happened.”

Of the many questions biologists are asking — How many parasites can a salmon withstand before dying? When, exactly, did theoutbreak start, peak and subside? — one of the most critical is whether the mid-September emergency flows averted a catastrophe. Belchik cautions that Ich outbreaks are rare and poorly understood, but, he says, “the leading hypothesis is that, yeah, we saved the fish.”

The triumph may prove precarious. Belchik, Strange and others think Ich’s re-appearance last year was prompted not just by years of drought, but by long-term ecological degradation caused by dams — degradation that’s becoming more problematic in the warming West. The 2002 catastrophe prompted a landmark series of settlements, the Klamath Agreements, intended to resolve water conflicts in the basin, partly by removing four dams from the river — a great benefit for salmon. But the enabling legislation has stalled in Congress. For now, Klamath salmon, and the tribes that rely on them, must make do with conditions at hand.

Those conditions look grim: In early April, Trinity Reservoir levels were two-thirds of average, while snowpack in the Klamath Basin was 6 percent of the 30-year median — a record low. With so little snowmelt, the river will decline quickly. O’Rourke, the Yurok chairman, foresees a difficult summer: “I’m thinking we’re in trouble.”

]]>No publisherFishWaterRivers & LakesNorthwestTribesCaliforniaCoastOregonCommunities2015/04/27 03:10:00 GMT-6ArticleRefugees from a well-watered Westhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.7/refugees-from-a-well-watered-west
Review of “Relicts of a Beautiful Sea” by Christopher Norment.

Relicts of a Beautiful Sea: Survival, Extinction, and Conservation in a Desert WorldChristopher Norment288 pages hardcover: $28.University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Relicts of a Beautiful Sea is a wide-ranging, obsessively detailed and oddly inspiring book –– an intriguing tapestry of scientific exploration and natural history that also takes turns as a eulogy, a love letter, a poem and ultimately a plea.

In Relicts, Christopher Norment — a professor of environmental science and biology — sets out to consider the nonmonetary value of six “relatively obscure” Great Basin and Mojave desert species that we can’t eat, hunt or sell: black toads, Inyo slender salamanders and four species of pupfishes.

Why these six species? In part because of their obscurity: Due to their small sizes and relative inaccessibility, Norment writes, they “carry little of the innate appeal” of charismatic megafauna such as gray wolves or whooping cranes, nor do they play much of an economic role. That obscurity allows us to ponder their worth without immediately reaching for our wallets.

They are also, however, aquatic species restricted to tiny patches of habitat in the Mojave and Great Basin deserts — vulnerable to water prospectors, the bright tentacles of Las Vegas and the thirsty whirlpool roar of Los Angeles.

Norment points out that similar species have also survived withdrawing- Pleistocene seas, earthquakes, uplift and hot water only to succumb to thirst or thoughtlessness: Tecopa pupfish, for example, which could endure temperatures up to 108 degrees but went extinct after hot springs outflows were developed and combined for bathhouses; Las Vegas dace and the Vegas Valley leopard frog, lost in the 1950s and 1940s, respectively, to groundwater pumping for and expansion of Las Vegas itself; the Ash Meadows montane vole, likely extirpated some time in the 1960s as alkali meadows devolved into peat mines, alfalfa farms and ranches.

After a pause to remember the fallen, Norment moves on to the precarious living, one species and one chapter at a time. As he weighs their worth, Norment visits the animals themselves, the people trying to save them and those who might someday have a hand in their destruction. He travels from the deep past — describing a volcanic eruption 760,000 years ago that could have buried or burned Inyo slender salamanders out of existence, but somehow didn’t — to the present and near future, examining the threats the pupfishes face from Las Vegas’ and Los Angeles’ ongoing searches for water, among other things.

He explores abstract concepts such as loneliness and hope while circling back to concrete and enchanting tidbits of information, such as the world’s remaining weight of Devils Hole pupfish — measured in raisins — and what their vocalizations sound like underwater (squirrels gnawing on walnuts).

Norment loves his diminutive subjects enough to actually risk using the word “love.” What can a scientist so steeped in wonder communicate to someone who says, as one woman in the book does about extinct Tecopa pupfish, “I think they were pretty tiny, not good for much of anything. You couldn’t eat them. Not like trout.”?

Salt Creek pupfish, Cyprinodon salinus salinus.

Scott Hein

Norment’s answers turn out to be surprisingly good ones. He doesn’t try to make a direct appeal to the people who prize false fountains and alfalfa farms far more than desert springs and species (and who — let’s face it — are unlikely to read this book).

Instead, he writes a thoughtful and thought-provoking letter to the rest of us: those who didn’t know desert aquatic species existed, those who take them for granted or rationalize that they’ll survive our tender inattention, and even those who have almost given up, who are already privately lamenting the loss of the tiny beleaguered species and places they love. Especially those.

“Think about how resilient the pupfish are, and what they have endured,” Norment writes, “and then contemplate, gently, your own struggles and what you have endured. For all of us, at some time or another, this can be a dogshit world, unbelievably cruel and sorrowful and painful. ... But I will say this: that in my own life I have been consoled and heartened by the strength of pupfish and salamanders. ... Their presence in the world, their insistent example, helps me to endure and go on, too.”

]]>No publisherBooksWaterFish2015/04/27 03:10:00 GMT-6ArticleTribal fishing on the Klamath Riverhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.7/a-plague-on-the-klamath-river/tribal-fishing-on-the-klamath
Photographs of sturgeon, steelhead, salmon and lamprey fishing.The Klamath River flows out of the high deserts of southern Oregon, bending southwest across the state line and then plunging through thickly forested canyons before emptying into the Pacific Ocean on the Northern California coast. Its headwaters are dammed and diverted, mainly for agriculture and electricity generation, but the lower river is home to the third-largest salmon runs in the Continental U.S., as well as populations of steelhead, lamprey, sturgeon and other species. Tribes in the lower basin—the Yurok, Hoopa and Karuk—have long relied upon this fishery and have fought to protect it in the face of habitat loss and ecological degradation. California’s ongoing drought has brought additional stress to an already strained situation, but the river remains an essential source of food and income for many of those who live along it.]]>No publisherPhotosPhoto GalleryFishTribesRivers & LakesNot on homepageEconomyPeople & Places2015/04/27 03:10:00 GMT-6ArticleIdaho’s Panther Creek comes back from the deadhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/idahos-panther-creek-comes-back-from-the-dead
Two decades after restoration began, life returns to a stream sterilized by mining.The first time Chris Mebane visited Blackbird Mine in 1992, polluted runoff from the mining site had created a toxic rainbow. Blackbird Creek was running bright red, Bucktail Creek was an eerie neon blue, and Panther Creek was nearly devoid of aquatic insects, never mind salmon. When Mebane dropped test cages full of rainbow trout into Blackbird Creek, the fish were dead within 48 hours. “It was about as lifeless as you can get outside of an autoclave,” he recalls.

Two decades later, however, Mebane and his colleagues have published a new study demonstrating a dramatic turnaround. The damaged ecosystem has nearly returned to full health — a vindication of one of the West’s largest mine cleanups.

The sordid saga of Blackbird Mine begins in the late 1800s, when mining companies first began digging tunnels and open pits to extract copper and cobalt. As production ramped up, so did the accumulation of acidic tailings — nearly 10 billion pounds altogether. The waste tainted surrounding creeks, forming a “chemical dam” in Panther Creek: a wedge of polluted water, impassable to fish.

The evolution of Bucktail Creek, from copper-tainted mess to functional ecosystem. Photos courtesy of Joe Baldwin and Chris Mebane.

Back in ‘92, Mebane’s grim testimony convinced the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to enter the fray on behalf of salmon, adding another player to the legal muddle. Blackbird had changed hands numerous times over the years, and its owners, Noranda and Hanna, were reluctant to pay for their predecessors’ sins. Finally, in 1995, the sparring parties reached a settlement: Four companies would pay $50 million to clean up the festering site.

In the coming years, the mining firms pulled out all the stops.They relocated sediment, built containment dams and, rather creatively, routed water through the mine’s tunnels to a treatment plant. They also improved fish habitat, primarily by erecting livestock fencing along streambanks, to compensate for harm to salmon. “We were among the first in the Upper Salmon Basin to attempt riparian fencing, before most people were thinking about it,” says Noranda attorney Bruce Smith.

As the cleanup proceeded, Mebane changed jobs a few times, eventually transferring to the U.S. Geological Survey, where he works today as a self-described “dirty water biologist.” But Blackbird Mine never strayed far from his thoughts. And as he and other scientists kept tabs on the afflicted creeks, they noticed some encouraging developments: Life was returning to the lifeless streams.

The first to bounce back were the salmonids, which recolonized streams as copper and cobalt concentrations waned. By 2002, rainbow trout were again present in all of the once-poisoned creeks; now they’ve returned to full abundance. Chinook salmon began spawning in Panther Creek in the early aughts as well, a process that the state expedited — perhaps a touch rashly — by dumping in a load of hatchery fish in 2001. Today, Panther’s salmon run is self-sustaining.

Rainbow trout have made nearly a full recovery in the creeks around Blackbird Mine. Photo courtesy of USGS.

To be sure, not every creek-dweller proved so instantly resilient. The diversity of aquatic insects — aka trout chow — is still down by 10 to 30 percent. Perhaps that’s because those invertebrates are more sensitive to lingering toxicants, or maybe the insects that recovered first are outcompeting the later arrivals. Regardless, the stunted bug diversity doesn’t appear to be holding back fish.

So can we say Idaho has fully recovered from the ravages of Blackbird Mine? Not exactly: Restoration is more like climbing a flight of stairs than shooting up in an elevator, and there are still steps to ascend — fish haven't yet resettled the upper stretches of Blackbird Creek, for instance. Still, the ecosystem has climbed a long way already. “It’s taken more work and more money than anybody anticipated, but when you look at the biological outcome, everybody feels very good about the work we’ve done,” says Smith.

Mebane agrees. “This place has always been a cautionary tale: If you’re building a new mine, don’t let this happen to you,” he says. “But it’s a story of hope and redemption, too. You can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again — even if Humpty-Dumpty ends up with some scar tissue.”

Ben Goldfarb is a Seattle-based correspondent for High Country News. Correction: And earlier version of this story stated that Blackbird Mine is now owned by Rio Tinto, which is incorrect. HCN regrets this error.

]]>No publisherIdahoMiningNew ResearchRivers & LakesFishWildlife2015/04/20 05:10:00 GMT-6ArticleWashington’s Swinomish sue to halt Bakken oil trains http://www.hcn.org/articles/washingtons-swinomish-sue-to-halt-bakken-oil-trains
Many communities fight transport of crude oil through their towns; some find legal footing to succeed.To the Coastal Salish people living on Washington’s Swinomish Reservation, water remains an important aspect of daily life. Their ancestors fished for salmon at the mouths of Northwestern rivers and gathered shellfish on Pacific tidelands; modern Swinomish people still pursue these activities from their small reservation on the Puget Sound. Many fish for their own subsistence, and many work as employees of the Swinomish Fish Company, which serves international markets.

Even so, for more than 20 years, the Swinomish have consented to strictly regulated use of a railroad that crosses waters on either side of their island reservation. The track, operated by Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC, crosses a swing bridge over Puget Sound’s Swinomish Channel, passes several Swinomish businesses, and then crosses a trestle over Padilla Bay, originally on its way to Anacortes, where it historically delivered lumber. A legal agreement between the tribe and the company limited the amount of traffic that would cross the reservation and waterways to Anacortes and required the company to inform the tribe about its cargo.

In the 1990s, the last section of railroad to Anacortes was removed, and the tracks ended on March Point, which houses two oil refineries. Burlington Northern fell behind on their annual reports, and the tribe assumed the trains were carrying supplies to the refineries.

But in 2012, reservation residents began to see 100-car trains—four times as long as the agreed maximum length. Then an Anacortes newspaper reported that the trains were carrying Bakken crude, a volatile oil that has figured in numerous train explosions in recent years, some of them deadly.

Burlington Northern had not informed the tribe that the cars carried this new, dangerous cargo, and ignored tribal requests to desist. So last week, the tribe filed a lawsuit in federal court. The suit asks the court to reinforce the original car limit and to prohibit the transport of Bakken crude via rail across the reservation.

“It’s not a matter of if another train will blow up; it’s a matter of when,” Brian Cladoosby, chairman of the Swinomish tribe, recently told me. “We want to make sure it doesn’t happen in our backyard.”

But while many Western communities are grasping for protection against dangerous shipments of crude oil, the Swinomish tribe has a unique instrument for getting it done.

The instrument has to do with the way tribal trust lands work. Tribal trust land, unlike much off-reservation land, requires consent from both the federal government and the tribe before utilities and railroad companies can build infrastructure. But for a century, Burlington Northern and its predecessor companies broke this law by maintaining a railway on the Swinomish reservation without consent from either. In the late 1970s, the tribe sued the company for a century of trespass, reaching a settlement in 1991 that gave the company an easement for continued use of the railway, albeit with a few restrictions: No more than one train could cross the reservation per day in each direction, none could have more than 25 cars, and Burlington Northern would have to inform the tribe of the trains’ cargo at least once per year.

Then came the Bakken boom, and with it a dramatic increase in traffic as trains rushed to carry oil from the Bakken to the West Coast, where ports could take the fuel to international markets. After seeing the traffic increase on their reservation, “the tribe had conversations with Burlington Northern,” says Stephen LeCuyer, director of the office of tribal attorney. “But in the meantime the tribe was seeing explosive derailments of Bakken oil trains, and reached the conclusion that they would not consent to an increase of over 25 cars per day.” After the tribe brought their concerns to Burlington Northern, the company said it wanted to negotiate. Meanwhile, the oil trains kept rolling. That led to last week’s suit.

Burlington Northern has yet to file their case, but in a statement, company spokesperson Gus Melonas argues that it has a legal obligation to carry the oil. “As a common carrier, we are obligated under federal law to move all regulated products, which ensures the flow of interstate commerce,” he said in a statement.

“The Easement Agreement includes a mechanism to address rail traffic volumes to meet shipper needs, and we have been working with the Swinomish Tribe for several years to resolve this issue.” The mechanism Melonas refers to is a stipulation in the agreement, wherein the tribe agrees not to “arbitrarily withhold permission to increase the number of trains or cars when necessary to meet shipper needs.”

To the tribes, this mechanism is null. Given the dangerous nature of Bakken crude, the tribe is confident it’s not making an arbitrary decision “in any way,” LeCuyer says.

Their complaint was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, and was formally served on April 10. Burlington Northern must now file a response within 21 days of the formal complaint. At that point, the court will issue a schedule for hearings, and the case will eventually be decided by U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik.

Jan Hasselman, an attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law group that has handled many cases related to oil transportation, said the Swinomish argument appears “airtight.”

“BNSF made an agreement with them, and it violated that agreement,” he said. But Hasselman added that the case wouldn’t likely set a precedent for other communities. “Their agreement is pretty unique,” he said. “But this is yet another example of communities all across the country in different ways rising up to the threat of crude oil transportation.”

Earlier this year, Washington’s Quinault tribe was able to slow shipping of crude-by-rail near their reservation by challenging oil terminals that were being built without an environmental impact statement.

Meanwhile, the Swinomish Tribe is also testifying against a Canadian pipeline that would carry crude oil to ports in the Salish Sea, the body of water that encompasses the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Puget Sound. Alternative forms of oil transportation, like pipelines and barges, may be safer to human communities, but they would still put fisheries at risk.

“We, of course, always have concern about tankers hitting our reefs,” Cladoosby says. “Thank God that has never happened. We live on an island surrounded by water. We’ve lived here since time immemorial, and the Creator has blessed us with every species of wild salmon. We work very hard to take care of it.”

]]>No publisherTribesWaterCoastCommunitiesDangerEnergy & IndustryFishNorthwestOceanTransportationWashington2015/04/16 13:15:00 GMT-6ArticleTribal water compact moving through Montana legislature http://www.hcn.org/articles/a-montana-tribal-water-rights-agreement-nears-completion-in-legislature
But the bill stirs up longstanding criticism of basic tribal sovereignty. On Feb. 16, in a Montana Senate hearing in Helena, legislators listened for over five hours as more than 200 people testified on the Salish and Kootenai tribes’ last chance to pass what may be the most important water rights compact in Montana history. The agreement would clarify the amount of water the tribes can use, safeguarding the economic stability of the tribes and their neighbors for generations to come.

In the past four decades, six tribal reservations in Montana have successfully negotiated water compacts with the state. A 1979 act and subsequent court decision required the state and resident tribes to clearly define tribal water rights, but the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, which share a reservation and a tribal government, have yet to get such a compact. This is their last chance to do so; the 1979 law set a deadline of July 1, 2015, after which it requires tribes to settle the question on a case-by-case basis by suing competing water users.

Though the last-chance iteration of their contract is a complex 1,000-page-long document, the issue is simple: Without clear water rights, tribes and their neighbors face uncertainty about whether the water they’re using now is legally theirs and whether they’ll face expensive lawsuits to keep that water in the future.

If the tribes and surrounding communities don’t obtain clear water rights, their property values will also likely decrease. For these reasons, the compact is widely supported. But for a decade, extremist rhetoric has been hijacking the conversation about the compact, stirring up a century-old legacy of misunderstanding and fear of Indian self-determination. And that rhetoric has ramped up as the compact nears completion.

Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge, a haven for Montana birds, amphibians and reptiles, is on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes' reservation. Photograph courtesy of Flickr user Michael Lusk.

“While the state is trying to negotiate the best possible settlement for the state of Montana, people are questioning the very basis of the (tribes’) right to have water rights,” says Barbara Chillcott, legal director for the environmental advocacy group Clark Fork Coalition.

For example, Republican Sen. Scott Sales began at the February hearing, addressing Vernon Finley, chairman of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ council, saying, "you stated that you represent a sovereign nation, [but] you’re dependent on the United States government. And my understanding of the term ‘sovereign’—and not just my understanding; the dictionary’s understanding—is that a sovereign nation requires independence…I was hoping maybe you could offer an explanation how this could be.”

Finley explained that case and federal law have recognized tribal sovereignty for almost two centuries and that receiving needed economic aid from the federal government—not to mention the history of oppression that created that need—does not change that. This question of the tribe’s fundamental legitimacy has appeared again and again this legislative session, as if tribal self-determination itself, and not a specific set of water rights, were somehow under debate.

In addition to environmental advocates and water groups, agricultural groups including Farmers and Ranchers for Montana, Montana Stockgrowers Association, the Montana Farm Bureau Federation, and the Montana Agricultural Business Association officially support the compact, as well as legislators both Republican and Democrat. A smaller faction of conservative legislators and advocacy groups, such as Montana Land and Water Alliance, oppose it. That group’s blog has published opposition arguments questioning the tribe’s ability to manage water rights.

As part of their challenge to basic tribal sovereignty, compact opponents are also attempting to overturn a long-standing treaty interpretation of fishing rights.

The compact would give the tribes rights to water not just from sources on the reservation, but from outside its boundaries as well. This can be traced to an 1855 treaty that gives the tribes rights to fish in areas surrounding the Flathead Reservation. Past case law interprets this to include the rights not just to fish, but to the water as well. But opponents of the agreement are debating it anyway, claiming that the original treaty only gave tribes the right to fish, not use water.

“Case law supports the off-reservation piece,” the Clark Fork Coalition's Chillcott said. “If the tribes have to litigate it, they’ll probably win. The state of Montana wants to deal with the uncertainty.” The compact, she said, is a compromise between the state of Montana and tribes, while case law has erred on the side of tribes.

The bill has passed the judiciary committee and the Senate floor. It is awaiting the House, where it is likely to pass with little debate on the hydrologic and economic details of the complex document. Instead, expect more suspicion and confusion about the very basis of Indian self-determination—from both legislators and the general public. That confusion and rhetoric will continue to color the debate, but isn’t likely to stop the compact from passing; it may be a small price to pay for a long-awaited compromise.

]]>No publisherTribesHydropowerMontanaRivers & LakesWaterPoliticsFish2015/03/27 12:15:00 GMT-6ArticleThe case of the snotty streamshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.5/the-case-of-the-snotty-streams
A mysterious algae known as “rock snot” is smothering wild rivers — and may hold clues to their future.On a cool, wet July morning at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic, Colorado, thick clouds erased the hulking mountains from view. The former mining town is a working summer camp for scientists. Brad Taylor, a Dartmouth professor, met his wife here. She studies bees, and he studies fish, the bugs they eat and the algae that set the bug buffet.

These days, he’s especially preoccupied with one kind of algae — an enigma that haunts wild rivers worldwide. Wearing a blue rain jacket and an orange baseball cap over salt-and-pepper hair, Taylor stood in a bubbling stream on lab property, his eyes searching the rocks for Didymosphenia geminata.Didymo (pronounced “Did-i-mo”) is a single-celled algae or “diatom.” Diatoms are among Earth’s most common life forms and the foundation of aquatic food webs. They’re only visible through microscopes, but if you’ve ever slipped on a slimy river rock, you’ve encountered them.

Brad Taylor stuns fish to observe the effects of whirling disease, which increases in response to Didymo blooms, in Copper Creek, Colorado.

Courtesy Crystal Edmunds/Coal Creek Watershed Coalition

Less than a decade ago, however, Didymo became much easier to spot here. The cells began sprouting stalks about the thickness of human hairs that coalesced into sprawling underwater manes, which felt like wet, dirty wool. They did the same in Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Connecticut, West Virgina, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Poland. The algal mats smothered streambeds for miles. They were inconvenient, threatening and gross — described, in scientific journals, as “mucilaginous.” In the popular press, Didymo was dubbed “rock snot.”

The mats mucked up fishing in popular rivers, like Montana’s Kootenai. Anglers’ casts got lodged in gobs of snot. They seemed capable of clogging water intakes, and, in the Rockies, were also bad for fish. The worms that carry whirling disease, an exotic killer of native trout, thrive in Didymo blooms. The mats even change the food web.

To demonstrate, Taylor grabbed a flat rock from the stream, and scraped pimples of Didymo into a dish. A mess of fidgeting midges emerged, but few large mayflies.Blooms favor small insects, Taylor explained; they can take refuge in the mats, while the larger ones become entangled and more vulnerable to predators. Here, that’s stunted the growth of some trout. Taylor next scraped a Didymo-free rock, revealing a diverse mix of bigger bugs. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to be able to say something’s going on,” he said.

Something — but what? Puzzlingly, the algae colonize rivers that are virtually devoid of phosphorus, the nutrient from farms and septic systems that often stimulates nuisance algae. So what’s behind Didymo’s advance? And can anything be done to make it stop?

Tufts of Didymo adhere to a rock.

Brad Taylor

If you fly-fish, you might have heard that Didymo is an invasive species. That may not, in fact, be true.

Canadian freshwater researcher Max Bothwell is one of the people most responsible for popularizing this idea. Now, he and Taylor are its most vocal critics. Bothwell, whom Taylor lauds as the “Yoda” of rock snot, spent much of the 1990s trying to finger its cause on Vancouver Island. Didymo cells were native there, but the blooms were new. Bothwell looked for evidence that rivers’ phosphorus levels had increased, but found none. Their hydrology hadn’t shifted significantly. Experiments also ruled out ultraviolet radiation from the waning ozone layer as the culprit.-

In 2004, Bothwell got a new clue when blooms were discovered in New Zealand, where Didymo cells had never been seen, despite thorough diatom surveys. Here, scientist Cathy Kilroy and others argued, Didymo was a recent immigrant, transplanted by humans. After a research trip to New Zealand in 2006, Bothwell started to wonder if Vancouver Island had suffered an introduction, too — perhaps of a new genetic strain more prone to stalk production. Combing historic records, he noticed that the blooms coincided with an uptick in fishing and the popularity of felt-soled waders, which prevent anglers from slipping in streams, but, if not properly dried and cleaned, can transport living cells. Plus, the blooms seemed to occur at popular fishing spots. The evidence for introduction of a genetic super-stalker was circumstantial, Bothwell wrote in his 2009 On the Boots of Fishermen paper, but it seemed convincing.-

The paper was a hit: Didymo was -declared invasive the world over. In some places, felt-soled waders were banned. Public agencies and fishing groups launched educational campaigns, -encouraging anglers to “check, clean and dry” their gear between rivers and switch to rubber-soled boots. In the past, says Dave Kumlien, who works on invasive species for Trout Unlimited, the stream-fishing community resisted the idea that they helped spread whirling disease, which, like a lot of aquatic invaders, was mostly invisible. “This is one that people could see, and it screwed up your fishing,” Kumlien says. “Didymo got stream anglers thinking about what they were doing. It began to shift the paradigm of -behavior.”

Bothwell thought he’d solved the mystery. “Finally, this monkey was off my back,” he says. “It seemed to make sense.”

A microscopic image shows the silica cell wall of the Didymo diatom.

Sarah Spaulding/USGS

Except it didn’t — not entirely, anyway. By then, Brad Taylor was separately studying Didymo in Colorado, where invasion seemed an unlikely explanation. The cells had long been present in streams, but Taylor and others never saw long, thick mats around the field lab until 2006 and 2007. In 2008, however, the mats didn’t appear. They smothered streambeds again the next year, but didn’t in 2011. And Didymo erupted only in certain streams, even though the cells lived in many others. If the blooms were caused by an invasion of a genetic mutant, shouldn’t they grow every year, in every stream?

Taylor suspected something in the environment had shifted. The blooms followed unusually warm springs and rapid snowmelt. In non-bloom years, on the other hand, substantial snowpacks melted gradually, more as they had in previous decades, when Didymo cells remained benign. Taylor measured flows in unaffected and affected streams; the latter peaked about two weeks earlier, because they drained smaller watersheds, or were more exposed to the sun.

Around the same time, Bothwell and Kilroy — who had been running experiments in New Zealand — made an unexpected discovery: Didymo bloomed when levels of the nutrient phosphorus dropped. Typically, the opposite is true. Most algal blooms — the toxic blue-green variety in Lake Erie, for instance — are caused by spikes in phosphorus.

The drop Didymo responded to was so small it wasn’t even measureable with traditional tools. That’s why changes in the nutrient’s levels hadn’t registered in other streams despite testing. The scientists think cells produce stalks to allow the cells to move up into the water column, where they have a better shot of accessing traces of phosphorus, which they need to divide and reproduce.

Epeorus deceptivus and other flat mayflies decrease in abundance in response to Didymo blooms.

Bob Henricks

Taylor and Bothwell began brainstorming potential causes of phosphorus declines. Last spring, they published a paper detailing their leading theories — and arguing that Didymo, rather than being invasive,is probably native to most places it’s bloomed.

If they’re right, Didymo may ultimately be a lesson in how minor environmental changes can have outsized effects on ecosystems. Taylor now believes the Colorado blooms are linked to changes in the timing of spring, a sign of the warming climate. When spring comes early to the Rocky Mountain Lab — as it does with increasing regularity — rapid snowmelt could be flushing phosphorus from soil in one big pulse, rather than delivering it gradually, depriving streams of the nutrient after the snow is gone. Or, when plants “turn on” early, they might use more of the available phosphorus, leaving less for streams. Most likely, some combination of these factors is at work. Elsewhere, phosphorus declines could be a symptom of nitrogen pollution, from the atmosphere or fertilizer- applications.

U.S. Geological Survey diatom expert Sarah Spaulding agrees that the evidence that phosphorus regulates blooms is compelling, but thinks Taylor and Bothwell have been too quick to dismiss the human role. The idea that human-caused changes in phosphorus and nitrogen are driving the blooms “might be true,” she says, “but it needs to be shown with data.”

Cathy Kilroy, in New Zealand, tends to agree with Taylor and Bothwell that in much of the world blooms are likely to be the result of environmental changes. But many questions remain. There is still no historic evidence, she says, of the cells in New Zealand streams, and it’s even possible that a boom in environmentally triggered blooms “facilitated (the) spread of cells, possibly to places where Didymo wasn’t present previously.”

Taylor acknowledges that more research is needed. But if Didymo was introduced to some rivers, he believes, it will continue to spread, whether on the boots of fishermen or the hooves of livestock and wildlife. “If environmental factors are causing the blooms, that’s the main issue,” he said. “We need to nail down if Didymo is a good sentinel for impending changes” — the canary-in-a-cage for rivers, warning of important shifts most of us can’t yet perceive.

]]>No publisherRivers & LakesNew ResearchFishClimate Change2015/03/16 04:15:00 GMT-6ArticleLatest: Oregon chub is no longer endangeredhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.5/latest-oregon-chub-is-no-longer-endangered
The species became the first fish to recover enough to be delisted. BACKSTORYThe Oregon chub, a minnow endemic to the Willamette River drainage, was common in sloughs, marshes and beaver ponds until habitat loss and invasive species reduced the population to fewer than 1,000. In 1993, the chub was added to the federal endangered species list. Though more fish are listed than mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians, none have been successfully recovered. “Freshwater habitats are the most endangered worldwide,” said native fish expert Peter Moyle (“The little fish that could,” HCN, 3/3/14).

FOLLOWUPIn February, the chub became the first fish ever to be taken off the list. (The Modoc sucker, in Oregon and California, has been proposed for delisting; a decision is due in May.) Its recovery involved numerous habitat restorations and introductions, some on private land, but required no major water or land-use changes. “In most of the West, we deal with the concern that we’re going to take away water that people need,” says Oregon Fish and Wildlife biologist Paul Scheerer. “That was not the case here.”